No zombie bees in Chronicle rooftop hives

SF State systemic biology graduate student Christopher Quock is seen with a diy light trap in the Chronicle's rooftop garden on Thursday, June 21, 2012 in San Francisco, Calif.

SF State systemic biology graduate student Christopher Quock is seen with a diy light trap in the Chronicle's rooftop garden on Thursday, June 21, 2012 in San Francisco, Calif.

Photo: Russell Yip, The Chronicle

Photo: Russell Yip, The Chronicle

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SF State systemic biology graduate student Christopher Quock is seen with a diy light trap in the Chronicle's rooftop garden on Thursday, June 21, 2012 in San Francisco, Calif.

SF State systemic biology graduate student Christopher Quock is seen with a diy light trap in the Chronicle's rooftop garden on Thursday, June 21, 2012 in San Francisco, Calif.

Photo: Russell Yip, The Chronicle

No zombie bees in Chronicle rooftop hives

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The lab tests are in, and the results are a relief: no zombie bees in The Chronicle rooftop hives.

San Francisco State researchers took our bees to their lab to check for signs of the parasitic phorid fly, a pinhead-size white insect that lays its eggs inside the bee's abdomen. The hatchlings devour the bee from within, causing a neurological meltdown and odd behavior, like flying at night, toward streetlights.

This latest threat to the beleaguered honeybee was discovered by San Francisco State biology Professor John Hafernik and graduate research assistant Christopher Quock, after they noticed larvae hatching out the necks of dead bees they had collected on campus to feed to a praying mantis.

Their discovery made national headlines earlier this year, as a possible factor in colony collapse - an alarming disruption to the bee population that is causing beekeepers to lose 30 percent of their hives annually.

Now Hafernik and Quock are collecting more bees throughout the Bay Area to determine the scope of the phorid fly's impact on the honeybee.

In March, Hafernik and Quock set up a night-light in The Chronicle's rooftop garden to capture specimens for their lab. Bees attracted to the light fly into the light, stun themselves and drop into a plastic bucket below the light. The next morning, they collected 35 bees and took them back to their lab. They waited two weeks for maggots to emerge, but none did.

Perhaps it just isn't phorid fly season.

"The fall is the more active time for the phorid fly," Hafernik said. "We've only found a few infected bees on campus so far this year."

In May, they returned with a new do-it-yourself light trap, a plastic light basket from the hardware store with a blue party light, secured to the bottom half of a plastic juice container with twist ties. It's a $12 prototype they hope citizen scientists will use to help them collect phorid fly data. The commercial insect light traps cost $200.

The DIY trap collected one bee. To make sure the light hadn't malfunctioned, Quock conducted a second overnight test. The light trap was empty the next morning, but he collected six bees from the ground nearby.

So far, The Chronicle bees have a clean bill of health. It could be that our sanctuary above Fifth and Mission streets provides good protection against the fly, or it could be that the homemade light trap needs some tweaking. Or the phorid fly attacks at a different time of the year.

And because there are more questions than answers, Hafernik and Quock will keep coming back monthly to collect more data.

What they find now may one day reverse the decline of the honeybee. As the world's most important pollinator, responsible for every fourth bite we put in our mouths, it's not going too far to say that Hafernik and Quock are doing much more than simply looking at bugs, they are potentially saving our food supply.

ZomBee Watch

John Hafernik and his team are reaching out to the public for help tracking parasitized honeybees. On Tuesday, they'll launch ZomBee Watch, a citizen-science site featuring tutorials on how to build light traps from household materials and upload pictures and data on any parasitized bees found. www.zombeewatch.org.